When I go grocery shopping here in Gifu, I started to notice something.

I see more foreign residents.

Maybe this is normal in bigger cities.

But here, it wasn’t like this before.

Some stand out more.

Caucasians.

Indians, Pakistanis, Brazilians.

Others are less obvious.

Vietnamese.

Malaysians.

Indonesians.

But after living more than 30 years in the Netherlands, I learned to recognize it.

Not just by language or how people dress.

It’s in how people move.

How they talk.

How they carry themselves in public.

If you haven’t lived in a multicultural society, you probably don’t notice it.

In the Netherlands, I never thought of people as foreigners.

I saw them as residents of foreign descent.

Because they lived there.

Like I did.

And many of them blended in completely.

I did too.

People assumed I was Dutch.

I spoke the language.

I behaved like everyone else.

Being a foreigner didn’t mean standing out.

It meant not creating friction.

That stayed with me.

And I notice I do the same here in Japan.

I don’t try to become Japanese.

But I try not to stand out.

I dress in a way that fits.

I speak as appropriately as I can.

I follow the unwritten rules.

Not to disappear.

But to move through daily life without causing friction.

Maybe that’s what I learned living in different places.

Not to become something else.

But to live in a way that doesn’t disturb what’s already there.